ARM boasts of second gen Mali T600 GPUs

ARM has announced the second generation of its Mali T600 series GPUs, which the company claims will “dramatically” improve tablets, smartphones and smart TVs.

The Cambridge based company said at Siggraph 2012 that each product will bring in a 50 percent performance increase, compared to first generation Mali T600 products on the same silicon process.

These are the first of its designs to include ARM’s Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression – ASTC. ASTC, the company claims, can significantly boost GPU performance as well as increasing the battery life of devices, meaning an always-on and connected experience for end users. Open standards-focused industry consortium, Khronos, has gien it the green light.

This second generation of Mali-T600 has three GPUs, the T624, the T628, and the T678. ARM claims that each has been fine tuned to provide best in class performance – as well as energy efficiency – for different kinds of devices. Smartphones and smart-TVs will appreciate the T624 and T628, and the T678 is specifically optimised for the tablet market.

ARM says that by applying ARM Cortex processors to the Mali GPU, the company is able to provide greater control when balancing tasks between each, as well as allowing devices to perform the right task on the most efficient architecture. The company says this sort of improved energy efficiency will pave the way for improving on mathematically heavy tasks, like computational photography, multi perspective views, and real time photo editing on mobile devices.

ARM’s Pete Hutton, general manager of the media processing division, boasted that GPU compute enables “higher standards” of visual computing on smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs. GPU compute, Hutton says, increases the range of functions mobiles can perform with the available battery life. “ARM continues to focus on system wide optimisation by integrating market leading CPU and GPU technologies to drive both high performance and energy efficiency,” Hutton said.

ARM wheeled out partners like Samsung, Rockchip, Nufront, MediaTek, and Fujitsu Semiconductor who all waxed lyrical about using the British company’s latest technologies.